A Feature-Based Approach to Product Line Production Planning

A production plan, which describes how core assets are used to develop products, has an important role in product line engineering as a communication medium between core asset developers and product developers. Recently, there have been efforts to address issues related to production planning; however, most of them focus on the process and business/management aspects of production planning, and not much emphasis is given to technical issues such as deciding features that will be made as core assets and their granularity. In this paper, we introduce a feature-based approach to product line production planning and illustrate how our approach addresses these technical issues. In our approach, a feature model and feature binding information are used as primary input to production plan development. A product line production plan developed using our approach could be easily customized to a product-specific production plan, because it was developed with consideration of units of product configurations as well as their integration techniques.